Enter the Goran

You wake with a familiar wetness
between your legs. It’s not long after midnight.

Oh no,
here we go again.It feels like those bomb drills you did at school back
in the Eighties, during the State of Emergency. When a siren would wail and you’d
all have to climb under your graffitied wooden desks, whispering and giggling,
until given the all-clear to resume your lesson about Bartholomew Diaz or The Great Trek. As it turns out, this isnotanother drill,or false alarm, but thereal freakin’ deal.

Kicking off the duvet, you roll onto your side,
simultaneously throwing your lower legs over the edge of the bed and hoisting
the upper half of your seven-month pregnant body upright. You then stand and
steady yourself against the bedroom wall, before lurching to the bathroom, and
flipping on the light switch. As you lower yourself onto the toilet, and reach
for the loo paper to mop up the mess, there is an audiblewhoosh!and a bizarre sensation of liquid gushing out of you,
splashing into the water at the bottom of the bowl.Could this be your waters breaking?It is certainly how youimagineit would feel. But spreading your thighs and peering through
the gap, the sight that greets you is so grim, for a moment you think you might
vomit.

The bowl is full of blood. The water
has turned a terrifying shade of crimson, its surface covered with hundreds of
tiny bubbles. And the pristine white porcelain is now splattered with red, like
a macabre Jackson Pollock.

‘Lee!’ you scream, your voice
sounding like it comes from somewhere far away. ‘I think I’m having a
miscarriage!’

Within a split second he is at the
bathroom door, face puffy, eyes like saucers, hair wild.

‘Jesus!’ is all he manages when he
sees the amount of blood. ‘I’ll go get the car.’

You stuff a few wads of
loo paper in your knickers, then roll up a hand towel into a sausage and wedge
it into your crotch, before yanking up your tracksuit pants as high as they
will go, to try and keep the towel in place. It is big and bulky, like those
old skool toweling nappies and safety pins you all wore as babies in the Seventies.
Where two weeks prior you had been pretty level-headed, now the floodgates
open, and you find yourself sobbing uncontrollably.

---

You probably should’ve lain flat on the back
seat, but you are already in the front passenger seat, and on the road, when
you feel another gush between your legs. Oh fuck, Lee’s going to be pissed if
you bleed all over his Range Rover’s cream leather seats!

Digging your feet into the depths of
the footwell under the cubbyhole, and pushing the chair back as far as it will
go, you use both hands to grab onto the handle above the passenger door in an
attempt to suspend yourself in a more-or-less horizontal position, to try and stem
as much of the haemorrhagingas possible.

‘I can’t feel him moving!’ you weep.
‘I think he’s dead!’

‘Hang in there, baby,’ Lee says as
calmly as possible. Words of comfort for his hysterical wife. A prayer for his
unborn son.

The growl of the V8 engine is
deafening as you hurtle north along the empty N1 – newly revamped for the FIFA
World Cup which had come and gone in a month-long whirlwind of jubilation and
infectious national pride just six months prior. Now suddenly the thought of your
future together without this child – a little person you’d never met, but whom
you'd already grown to love and even given a name – fills you with a sense of
sadness so deep, your chest physically aches.

It’s a twenty-minute drive door to
door, from home in Northcliff to the hospital in Olivedale, and with Lee’s driving, you’re making good time.But shortly after taking the Malibongwe exit
and then turning onto President Fouché, you get stuck behind an old Merc puttering along at a snail’s
pace. You are in a single lane, sandwiched between the pavement on the left and
a long winding concrete island on the right, separating your lane from oncoming
traffic.

‘I can’t bloody ram him out of the
way!’ he shoots back. Finally,
he sees a gap and pulls an overtake manoeuver that would've stunned
even the likes of Ayrton Senna.

---

As you roar up to the well-lit and
welcoming entrance of the hospital, you fling open the passenger door. Lee
shouts to the security-guard-slash-porter to bring a wheelchair, and within
seconds you are carefully lowered into the seat and then pushed quickly past
the lone receptionist, along bright-white, ghostly quiet corridors, and
into the maternity ward.

You are in a shocking state, your unwashed hair clinging to
your tear-streaked face and sweaty neck, as you hug your distended belly as
tightly as possible. One of the nurses recognises you from your previous emergency
visit a fortnight prior and, confirming your name, grabs your file. After seeing you off safely in the wheelchair, Lee had gone
to park the car, and he arrives back just in time to sign the necessary
paperwork.

You are then ushered to a small delivery room in the far
corner of the ward, transferred to a hard, narrow bed on wheels, and hooked up
to a foetal heart rate monitor and blood pressure monitor. When you hear
the familiar yet alien sounds of a little heartbeat, your own heart skips a
beat and you utter a gasp of relief – your baby is still alive! Although he
doesn’t appear to be in any sort of distress, your blood pressure is off
the charts; your swollen abdomen so rock hard, you could probably play coinage
off it.

The obstetrician on duty that night
arrives and introduces himself as Dr V. After one look at your blood pressure
reading and the scarlet-soaked hand towel, he immediately orders a nurse to
start prepping you for an emergency C-section.

‘It looks like you are having a placental abruption. I’m afraid if we
don’t get this baby out within the next 20 minutes, there’s a good chance we
may lose the both of you,’ he replies. In that instant your eyes lock, and the
gravity of the situation sinks in. From that moment on, your life, and that of
your baby, is in their hands.

A nurse sets about dry shaving where they will do the
incision, and you silently curse her for the inevitable ensuing ingrown hairs.
Lee, registering that this isit, rushes back to the car to
fetch the Sony Cyber-shot which he knows you always carry around in your
handbag. (The Nikon SLR which he’d given you for your birthday the year before is at home).

You are then transferred to a gurney, and what feels like mere moments later, find yourself under the glare of lights in an operating
theatre.

---

It's frigid in here. Like a
morgue. Dr V, who has a strange accent which you can’t quite place, introduces
the anaesthetist, Dr M, and the rest of the team. (Later Lee claims that Dr M
was the driver of the Merc).

‘You’re not allergic to anything?’ asks a voice, somewhat
rhetorically.

‘Just latex,’ you reply.

There is an abrupt halt in activity as half a dozen masked
faces turn towards you, eyes flashing, followed by a muffled grumble or two,
and then a flurry of slapping sounds as they all replace their regular surgical
gloves with latex-free ones. Clearly somebody hadn’t checked all the info on
your armful of 'raver' wristbands.

A black male nurse with kind eyes helps you to sit up on the
gurney, and asks you to turn your whole body, so your legs are dangling off the
side. Your hair hangs loose in greasy rats tails. You ask him for a hairband, a
rubber band,anythingto tie it all back. He looks at you apologetically, and says,
‘I’m afraid we don’t have anything like that in here. We’re going to do the
spinal block now.’

Out the corner of one eye you catch sight of Lee, in scrubs,
standing on the fringes of this maelstrom. He wears the wide-eyed look of a kid
in the front row seat of a Tarantino film. Out the corner of the other eye you
see Dr M moving in behind you. The nurse with the kind eyes stands directly in
front of you, takes each of your hands in his, as though you are about to waltz,
and tells you to press your forehead as hard as you can against his
chest. What follows is the most excruciating pain you have ever
experienced, like a sword being plunged right through your spine.
You yowl in agony, tears literally springing from your eyes. Then the nurse
helps you lie down, and within seconds it feels like your entire lower body has
died. You try to wiggle your toes, but from the waist down you may as well be a
chunk of lifeless wood; ancient, petrified. Lee is invited to take his place
behind your left shoulder, as a blue sheet is raised between your midriff and
the gore fest about to unfold below.

‘Ohmygod, that feels so weird!’ you half-laugh, a little
delirious, your lower body rocking gently from side to side as the scalpel
see-saw slices through flesh.

The same half-dozen pairs of eyes turn towards you, this
time filled with a sense of horror, rather than the earlier irritation.

There is a collective sigh of relief and one or two raised
eyebrows as the same half-dozen pairs of now slightly exasperated eyes turn
back to the task at hand.

Barely a minute later, the furtive silence is broken by the
most pitiful little cry. Your heart lurches as you catch the first glimpse of
your baby boy, still attached to his umbilical cord, being held up by Dr V over
the top of the sheet. A fresh flood of tears erupts, only this time they are
filled with intense relief and joy. You find yourself in a state of unexpected
euphoria, like a really intense Ecstasy high.

God, I can only imagine how terrifying the whole experience must have been. So moving. Can you believe your strapping boy was ever so tiny. They are so incredible. Now we just need the rest of the story.

Post a Comment

Jozibelle was born in March 2011, a few months after my son Goran Blake entered the world. In May 2016 I birthed my second child, 'Umbilicus: An autobiographical novel', which you can read more about on my author website, www.paulagruben.com. In May 2017 I decided to unpublish about 95% of the posts on Jozibelle because most of the content contained dead links & outdated info. These days I prefer to keep a simpler photo journal over on Instagram, so feel free to follow me there. You'll find links to all my social media pages in the drop-down menu here, as well as a library of links to things that are of interest & importance to me. Thanks for visiting!